Where I went
I completed my internship at Royal Ocean Kelp in Windy Bay, Prince William Sound. They are a new company owned by my mentor Thea Thomas and her partner. They grow two types of brown kelp, Sugar (Saccharina) and Ribbon (Alaria) kelp. At the moment Ribbon kelp is the only one they have that has a market in the US, but there is promise of an expanding market for Sugar kelp in the near future. They own a small farm that grows over 500 lbs of Ribbon kelp each year and roughly as much Sugar kelp. They like to focus on the sustainability of kelp and its numerous health benefits. You can order kelp from them at their website as well. |
My Link
When we started talking about Link I had the idea to go to Alaska and work with my former captain on her kelp farm. Since I was very young I have traveled back and forth between Colorado and Alaska to visit my dad. This has given me a lot of practice in travel and how to navigate airports and take care of myself with getting from one place to another. This was an invaluable skill to have when I took the trip to my Link. In addition to this, I felt that my curiosity and seeking for clarification were valuable as well. When I did not understand an issue or certain instructions, I asked my mentor for help or more information. I hoped that this wasn’t too much of an issue or nuisance, but it gave me needed clarification that helped me get the job done and learn about kelp farming.
About half way through my internship, my mentor and I went on a trip to harvest a tout of kelp for personal processing, with the intention of using it to make baked goods. While out there, I managed to fill my gloves with water and had accidentally packed the wrong raincoat, one without rubber and therefore basically useless on the water. My hands quickly became cold and I lost use of my fine motor skills. This is really bad and my mentor told me so afterwards. She gave me the advice to always be prepared for cold weather, meaning to always bring gloves or the proper equipment to a cold workplace. This was an important lesson to learn and was a challenge I overcame and grew from. I think that there was a benefit to the company for having me as an intern. I was helpful as an extra set of hands for the most part. When we were harvesting kelp, I helped by cutting the kelp off the line as it came in over the bow. This was helpful because we were implementing a new strategy to coil the lines as we stripped them. This new strategy required one person to drive and another to coil, leaving no one to cut kelp, so having me on board turned out to be advantageous to the process. At the end of my Link, my mentor actually said she was trying to help a local teacher start an aquaculture class at the local high school and that she would like to expand and have those students learn on her farm. This would be similar to having an intern and I bet it would open the door for future internships, most likely not with students from Durango though, purely because of the distance. I learned a lot during my internship. One of the biggest things I learned was that I don’t want to be a fisherman when I am older. My father is a fisherman and I currently work as a fisherman in the summers, but this internship helped me to realize I do not want to do that forever. I would like to go to college and learn more about the world. It also made me more aware of the future of kelp and aquaculture. Right now we mostly focus on salmon and fish farms, but we could really change the world by implementing sustainable kelp and seaweed farming throughout the US. Already Europe and Asia are decades ahead of us in their seaweed industry, but we as Americans are lagging behind because we do not think of seaweed as proper food. I hope that this will change in the future and we can live in a more sustainable world. |
I started talking with my mentor about what I wanted to do for my project a couple months ago. Last year she had ground up dried kelp and used it to make a strange green flour. This was then used as a partial or total substitute for ordinary flour in brownies and other baked goods. We came up with the idea to make this my project. I would experiment with some kelp flour to create new recipes incorporating them. My final project would be to make a recipe booklet with all these recipes and give it to my mentor to be used by or given to people who bought her kelp.
My first recipe was an adaptation of a bread recipe a friend shared with me. It is situated mainly for sea level, but I want to try and experiment with kelp flour baking at higher altitudes. This bread turned out great and rose perfectly the way I wanted it to. The most interesting aspect of the whole process was how green the bread became when I mixed the kelp flour in. It also had an incredibly strong flavor of kelp. The second recipe I made was pizza dough. This tasted great, but was only eaten with pizza sauce and cheese. The third recipe of note was a chocolate chip cookie recipe I made. There's a very interesting thing I discovered here, the amount of kelp I would use was in relation to the amount of flavor in each recipe. The bread was incredibly bland, so the small ratio of kelp made a strong kelp flavor. My pizza dough was in the middle and maybe a little bland, but the pizza sauce and other toppings created a stronger flavor than the kelp, resulting in a little kelp flavor that was mostly masked. The cookies were the least kelpy because of the amount of cinnamon they contained. I actually think the kelp brought the cinnamon flavor out more, creating an even better taste. |